There are a multitude of applications for materials and devices on a nanoscale, however to date limitations exist in tool fabrication, both in terms of accurate, reproducible yields and cost-effective generation.
Nano-imprinting methods have been developed for fabrication of such tools, using a hard mold stamped on a soft polymer film overcoating a silicon wafer, however, such technology is applicable for inorganic substrates and necessitates use of a “hard” mold and custom development to print a particular shape on a silicon wafer.
Nanotechnology has essentially been dominated by the development and characterization of materials and devices based on inorganic semiconductors and metals, at least in part due to e-beam lithographic patterning of inorganic materials on inorganic substrates. Using organic and inorganic based nano-lithography techniques, however, many different nano-devices (e.g nano-transistors, nano-sensors and nano-waveguides) are presently being fabricated. Nano-lithography, however, is extremely slow, and device fabrication time (and reproducibility) is a significant limiting factor in nanotechnology.
A major drawback of existing nanolithography techniques for fabricating nanoscale devices is that features of the device must be fabricated in a series of steps. Such techniques are accordingly limited to the construction of relatively simple devices since the fabrication of devices having greater features is too time-consuming. While multi-tip arrays for SPMs have been fabricated, to facilitate the parallel fabrication of perhaps tens or hundreds of nano-devices, it would be desirable to develop a nanoscale stamping technique that could complement such parallel device production, for mass-production of such devices, ideally developing a method that can produce many features in a parallel manner on a device in a single processing step.
Supramolecular Nanostamping (SuNS) is a printing technique for the patterning of soft organic/biomolecules. To date, the printing coverage achievable by existing techniques depends upon the roughness of the substrates utilized in the process. The extension of such a process holds promise for greater flexibility in nanocontact printing applications.